


Lives Wasted Away

by ScullyLovesQueequeg



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Complete, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:26:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3234530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScullyLovesQueequeg/pseuds/ScullyLovesQueequeg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder & Scully are trapped in a snow storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lives Wasted Away

“We could be stranded at the airport,” Mulder says, drawing a spiral in the frosted window right beside him. They are sitting beside each other in the backseat, trying to keep warm. Scully is not amused by his antics.

“We could have been stuck with another parasite,” he says after some time goes by. Scully is still not amused.

 

The day had started out like any other day: Skinner had called Mulder into the office, assigned him a case and expected a report as soon as possible. Mulder informed Scully, argued the plausibility of the case, and finally set out for the residence of the complainant.

The location didn’t matter. They never made it there.

A blizzard, a faulty battery and the fact that they were up in the mountains did not help. After arguing about it and discovering they were truly stranded, Mulder and Scully were forced to accept that one of the possible outcomes (and the most likely) was death. They had no food, no water, and no way of getting home.

 

“Remember, we could be stranded at the airport,” Mulder repeats, drawing yet another spiral on the frosted window adjacent to him. Now there is a pair of them. They are still sitting beside each other in the backseat, trying to keep warm. Scully is no less amused than the first time he suggested it.

“Or, we could be at the actual location, if you’d listened to me,” Scully asserts, refusing to look at Mulder. He glances over at her as she still shivers, despite being bundled up. Mulder, on the other hand, has his jacket open.

“You’re still cold? I have some blankets in the trunk if you want.” Mulder says, and the look Scully gives him is halfway between sincere gratitude and furious indignation. It’s during moments like these that she cannot resent him, because he cares, in his inconsistent way.

“Please,” she says, swallowing her pride. The door is a little hard to open with the snow, but he tries anyway. When he opens it and steps out, Scully shields her face from the cold, and watches Mulder’s actions in the rearview mirror. He takes out a couple of blankets and brings them back into the car, shutting the door behind him. They are worn with use.

“Why do you even have those?” she asks, stuttering between some of the words, and he tries not to show the concern on his face—he knows it’s pretty bad if she’s shivering. Without answering, he wraps her in the blankets, over her parka.

Finally, he replies, “I used to spend a lot of time out on the road. Still do. Sometimes, I end up sleeping in here.” The tone he uses is nonchalant, but deep down, it is a personal and intimate detail he reveals about himself and the way he lives.

She does not respond. She can understand, and though it makes her sad, she just sighs, because it is a life he chose for himself when he decided to move to the basement office. Mulder continues to talk, though it is about irrelevant things.

 _‘His blankets smell like him,’_ Scully thinks, half listening to Mulder. Her mind is wandering, and she wonders if they'll ever make it home. Her body aches, and she can't feel her fingers very much.

Mulder slips off his coat and also piles it on Scully. This smells like him as well. It is not a bad smell. It reminds her of days spent in the office, and warm coffee on a chilly December morning. It reminds her of her dad, and she wonders for a brief moment if she’ll be joining him. She hopes not.

When her attention falls back on Mulder, he is watching her with a strange look on his face that she cannot identify; on another man, it could have been love. But on Mulder, it scares her, almost.

Quietly, she asks, “Mulder, you're not cold?”

“No, if anything, I'm too hot. Don't worry about me, just try to stay warm,” Mulder says, tucking the jacket around her. For a moment, they catch each other’s eyes, but Scully says nothing, because everything is slowing down and she can’t feel anything.

 

“We could have been stuck with another parasite.” Mulder says after some time goes by. Scully is still not amused, and it annoys her that he is repeating himself. It’s probably the cold.

She had nodded off, but Mulder’s voice brings her back, and she realizes that for a brief moment, she doesn't know where she is or why she is in the car with him. Most curious of all, he’s staring at her in bewilderment, as though she is a zoo animal.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and his voice is low, his tone intimate and tender, the way it would sound after sex.

It’s in that moment, she realizes that maybe he loves her, and always has, in his own strange way. This thought is a fleeting one she cannot hold on to, so she closes her eyes and answers him.

“I'm fine, Mulder.”

For some reason, the reply takes three minutes when it should only be two seconds. She can't get her body to do what she needs it to do. Time is crawling by and now her fingers are hurting badly. She does not want to think of Mulder possibly loving her because she certainly loves him, and cannot stand the thought of misreading him again.

“Scully, you’re getting worse.” Mulder says, moving closer to her violently shivering frame, so that they are huddled together. Scully lets her head rest against Mulder’s side, and he threads his arm over her shoulders.

She is okay with this, whatever it is they have. It feels safe, like home. Pressed against his chest, she feels small and vulnerable to him, like Queequeg, the small dog she has at her apartment.

“I’m just a little cold, nothing that I can't handle.” she says, but the words trip over each other and spill out in a random order, and Mulder’s grip around her shoulders tightens. As long as they are together, neither of them will worry.

 

They both remain silent for an indeterminate amount of time; Scully’s head is in Mulder’s lap, and she sleeps, dreaming of warmer weather, and a lighter workload. She dreams of her father, Mulder’s father, her sister, Emily and the people who have gone ahead of her. Mulder’s fingers entangle themselves in her hair, and he frowns because her skin is a blueish tint at her cheeks, as well as her lips. They match his fingers, which hurt too much do anything useful with.

Mulder says her name quietly, too quietly to wake her, but just enough to hear if she had been awake. His tone is tender, but he stutters out the first part of her name, and barely manages to get through the rest. She stirs awake, though for reasons unrelated.

“Mulder, I’m scared. I’ve been thinking about the symptoms you and I are having and I think… we’re suffering from hypothermia. You need to put your coat back on and try to stay warm, okay?” Scully says this softly, slowly, and unclearly, but he doesn’t answer her, so she sits up to look at him.

His face is red, and she can see that his lips are beginning to turn blue. He’s probably just as cold as she is. He also looks scared, although he glances away when she makes eye contact. Seeing Mulder afraid makes her afraid too. So she climbs into the front seat and tries to start the car, but she cannot grasp the key. Mulder leans over, and has a marginally better time gripping it, so he turns the key in the ignition to see if the car will start.

Nothing happens.

So they try their phones, again.

No signal.

“We have to get to a place with a better signal…” Mulder says, and Scully nods, just barely making out his words. Mulder puts the car in neutral, and then climbs out, struggling with snow that’s in the way, ready to push. Scully climbs out too, but Mulder tries to convince her to go back inside, because she is using all her energy to get the door open. She ignores him, and when she has the door open, she marches to him.

“Scully, you can’t—I don’t—you have to keep warm, okay? You’re worse than I am right now,” Mulder says, though his words are stuttered and slow to come out. She hands him his coat and he puts it on.

“We’re in this together…” Scully manages to say, and so they both begin to push the car down the mountain, to see if they can get a better signal. The car moves, but it’s a negligible amount. There is simply too much snow.

Mulder is tired, and so is Scully, and they don’t have the energy to continue pushing—not with all the snow, and the fact that they are slowly starting to expire. Scully slumps against the car, and Mulder is too exhausted to continue alone. Scully’s weight causes the car to move a little, but not very far. She does not try to right herself. So Mulder drags them both back into the vehicle, slowly, secures it in park, and mentally prepares himself for the worst of it. Dragging her takes all of it out of him.

 

They both stay silent for a long time. It’s dark in the car and they cannot see much of anything, because the moonlight is not particularly bright. Mulder is lost in his thoughts. He thinks of his apartment, his mother, the fact that he won’t be joining her for the holidays and that he might not even be able to go home. His eyes surreptitiously glance at Scully, who he can only just make out in the darkness. She is huddled against the door. She is awake, but she continuously nods off, and he knows that she is not far from death’s door. He’s still on the other side of the fence, though.

“I’m sorry.” He says, feeling as though this was his fault. He is not far from wrong.

“What for?” she manages to ask, and for some reason, it seems to take her forever. The word ‘what’ has so much trouble coming forth without the extra warmth of the sun.

“This. We are probably going to die,” Mulder says, but he is stuck on the word ‘probably’, and so by the time he makes it to ‘die’, she has already forgotten what he was saying.

“Mulder, where are we?” Her words are hard to form, it’s hard to move anything, and her arms feel like dead weights against her sides so she stops trying to move them.

“We’re in the car,” he says, and then moves closer to where he thinks she is. “On a case. We’re stuck in a snow storm.”

Scully closes her eyes, though in the darkness, it makes little difference. “That's right. I almost forgot. Maybe you can keep me distracted by sharing with me things you wanted to do?”

Mulder looks over in the direction of her voice, and in what little moonlight reaches the car; she looks as though she is struggling to stay awake. If she falls asleep, he knows Scully will not wake up.

“I've always wanted to own a cat. It sounds silly but I like them, and I'm kind of regretting that I live the way I do because it makes it hard to own one,” Mulder says, though he stutters and wonders if Scully can understand.

“Sounds familiar… I felt that way about Queequeg…” she says, and he is content with the fact that she can still make out his words.

“That dog was evil.”

“How?”

“He killed his owner by feeding on her… I mean, there were times I could have sworn I saw—uh, you know, those um… feelers… tentacle-things.”

“You always say that… It was just a dog that was in a dire circumstance.”

“What if that were you? How do you feel about being eaten by some pseudo-Lovecraftian monstrosity?”

“It didn’t eat me, though. And I would be dead and not feel anything.”

“Yeah, because you got lucky. There was something seriously wrong with that dog. I guess it doesn't matter since we’ll probably be seeing him again soon.”

His words stumble around each other like the snow that falls outside. It takes a minute to process this, but when she realizes that she means they will die, she has to parse it again.

“Why do you say that?”

“I don't want to be a downer but… I don't think we are going to be rescued.”

“Already given up?” she asks, but he does not answer because he is shivering just as violently as she is and trying not to think about expiring in a rental car.

The night passes silently. He doesn’t sleep, but he is surprised to find Scully almost non-responsive when the sun rises. So he shakes her. She does not move.

He tries to feel for her pulse, but it is useless because he cannot feel anything anyway, and her pulse has either stopped or slowed considerably. He shakes her again, checking to see that he can still grip. Though he cannot feel it, he manages to grip her and she opens her eyes and looks over at him.

“Got you.”

He doesn’t smile. Instead, he moves her so she is resting her head in his lap.

"We’re probably not going to make it,” Mulder says.

“That’s okay. I’d rather die here with you, then alone in a hospital bed,” she says jokingly, but he doesn’t laugh.

 _‘It’s not fair, she shouldn’t have to die.’_ Mulder thinks because after all the things they both have gone through, they both deserve a chance to be happy, and that chance is shrinking rapidly, with every passing moment.

"I’m sorry,” Mulder says, though it sounds as if he is hissing and nothing intelligible comes out of his words. Scully wants to look out the window, but there is just the white infinite void that snow tends to create, and the sky, from the angle she is resting in, is grey. She can see the condensation as Mulder exhales, and when he looks down at her, she smiles in a sleepy sort of way that makes his heart skip a beat.

His heart skips several beats.

His heart has mostly slowed down, though.

Scully closes her eyes, because they hurt, and because she is incredibly tired. Mulder tries to speak again, but he is too cold and tired. They stay silent for a long time, and finally, Scully says, “I’m glad I'll get to spend the rest of my life with you.”

It is a grim statement that is uttered so quietly that any other time, he wouldn't have heard it. But he hears it now and he wants to feel anything but tired.

He summons his strength to hold her close, and then, whispering quietly, he says, “I love you.”

They are the last words Scully expects to hear and they sound strange and foreign to her, but she doesn't laugh because she knows that he was summoning up the strength to say it without hissing and stuttering. She knows that he will have to watch her go first before he collapses too. So she embraces him.

She is aware, hyper aware, that she will not make it the rest of the day, and so she says, with all her effort, “Me too. I love you, and I’m sorry.”

 

Mulder doesn't notice the exact moment when Scully passes, but it doesn’t matter because he can just tell that she is no more, and this scares him. He cannot even begin to fathom how life feels without her, but he knows that it will not be for long.

He cannot feel anything or move any more, save for a yawn which hurts his chest. He cannot speak either, but there is nothing to be said because he has said all he wanted, and everything is halting to a stop. He is still holding Scully, but he can’t feel anything other than the vicious cold, and suddenly, overwhelmingly, he has the urge to sleep.

_‘A little shut-eye won’t hurt.’_

And it doesn’t.

It never hurts, that way. It’s a quiet, sort of sigh that rolls out lazily, and then everything stops. He stops, his mind stops, and he is no more.

A deer walks by, and there are birds, making noise to greet the day but the snow has stopped falling, and the mountain creatures are resuming life again, avoiding the metal chamber that sits slightly askew in the middle of the road. It means nothing to them, just as they mean nothing to its former occupants, a pair of FBI agents who are huddled together in the cold, both gone now.

***

It’s the persistent and shrill ringing noise of Mulder’s cellphone that helps them locate the car. Walter Skinner frowns deeply, stepping out of the truck, and approaching the car with a flashlight. Just a quick look to confirm what he already knows: They’ve died.

He turns to the other men, the ranger’s staff and nods.

“Yeah, it’s them. That’s Mulder’s ringtone.”

“I’m sorry. They probably got caught in that storm a couple nights back and decided to hunker down here. It’s a shame, honestly, the station is only just down the road. Probably couldn’t see with all the snow.” the park ranger says, folding his arms over his chest and looking at the grim scene.

“Why didn’t they try to call?” Skinner asked, turning, so his back was to the scene that was unfolding behind him.

“Well, my guess? They tried. No signal though, the storm knocked out the cell tower and some power lines, too. What were they doing up here, anyway?”

“It was a case regarding a couple that resided up in the mountains,” Skinner says, watching as a stretcher rolls past him, with a sheet covering the occupant.

Another one follows. He huffs, and turns to face the car again which is now empty.

“Oh, you mean the Colemans? They didn’t make it either. We just went up to the house this morning. Been dead a couple days, though not from the cold. It was a bloodbath in there. A real shame,” the ranger says, rubbing his hands together.

“Ready to go, Boss,” one of the other rangers calls, from the tow truck. The head ranger standing with Skinner nods, and escorts him back into the truck they arrived in. Skinner looks down at his hands, and then out the window.

“You think they died quickly? I’ve got to tell their families something…” Skinner trails off, though he knows the answer. ‘ _They probably didn’t.’_

“No. Probably not, but at least they weren’t alone. You can tell them that,” the ranger says, driving the truck down the road, and out to the station.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry.


End file.
